Great Beauty in the World

“I mean, I was never a depressed person,” he says. “I've always been basically optimistic. I see great beauty in the world. You know, I look around and it's a fucking awesome beautiful place. That's how I've always felt. I'm not saying this is some kind of thing at the moment—I've always looked at the world in that way.… Writing is basically an act of love, and a kind of joyful thing to do. That quickening of the heart that comes when you're onto something. I mean, I get all kind of shaky and stuff like that. It's an immensely positive act, nothing to do with sadness or depression or any of these sorts of things, no matter what you're writing about.”
-Nick Cave GQ article, The Love and Terror of Nick Cave

In an essay and lecture that Nick Cave, who is now 59, wrote when he was in his early 40s, titled “The Secret Life of the Love Song,” he quoted the poet W. H. Auden: “The so-called traumatic experience is not an accident, but the opportunity for which the child has been patiently waiting—had it not occurred, it would have found another—in order that its life become a serious matter.” And, back then, Cave himself wrote:

Looking back over the last twenty years, a certain clarity prevails. Amidst the madness and the mayhem, it would seem I have been banging on one particular drum. I see that my artistic life has centred around an attempt to articulate an almost palpable sense of loss which laid claim to my life. A great gaping hole was blasted out of my world by the unexpected death of my father.... The way I learned to fill this hole, this void, was to write.

Recently, Nick Cave has been thinking about that Auden quote again, and he says that he has reconsidered.

“I always thought the traumatic incident was the death of my father,” he says, “but actually I don't think the traumatic experience had actually happened. It was waiting.”
-Nick Cave GQ article, The Love and Terror of Nick Cave